A database relating physical and cultural aspects of the uses of woody species’ diversity in musical instruments of the world
Résumé
Wood, the main building material of many musical instruments, affects their mechanical and acoustical behaviour. Different parts, instruments and organological families lend to a broad range of material requisites. Considering the lesser-studied instruments of geocultural ensembles other than Western “savant” music shows an even greater diversity of functions-chosen species. This diversity in used species is very little known, while instrument makers over the world are currently facing issues of availability and/or of conservation status of some of their preferred woods. Furthermore, comparable vibrational properties of woods including damping are scarce and highly scattered.
We present here the creation of a new specific relational database conceived as a tool to gather and study these aspects. It contains three main parts. 1) Botanical species (Tree and wood information and conservation; links to uses and properties). 2) World instruments (with the different woody species used for each part). 3) Viscoelastic vibrational properties of wood. Data sources are: our own field and experimental work; literature survey including many hard-to-obtain, non-English-language sources. Up-to-date taxonomy is checked with widely accepted sources.
Summary of data contained at present day: instruments =circa150; “instrument part/ used species” = c850; species with checked botany= more than 500; species used in instruments= c300; species with viscoelastic vibrational properties = c330 (covering about 5500 tests).
Some possible analysis from this databank include: 1) Material variations for a given part of instrument; 2) cross-cultural comparison of material choice; 3) range of variation in vibrational properties for one single wood species, covering several researches; 4) pointing out lesser-known species as viable alternatives to threatened species; etc.
Efforts must also be pursued on: vibrational characterization of wood diversity; collection of wood uses in worldwide instrument making cultures.